Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.
The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.
Georgia Blain has written a number of novels for adults including the bestselling Closed for Winter, which was made into a feature film. Her memoir Births Deaths Marriages: True Tales was shortlisted for the 2009 Kibble Literary Award for Women Writers.
In 1998 she was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists and has been shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the SA Premier’s Awards and the Barbara Jefferis Award. She lives in Sydney with her partner and daughter.
HOUSE of BOOKS
This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012
First published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd in 1998
Copyright © Georgia Blain 1998
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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ISBN 978 1 74331 337 4 (pbk)
ISBN 978 1 74343 050 7 (ebook)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
I would like to thank the Australian Society of Authors for the opportunity to take part in their mentorship scheme and Rosie Scott for being such a wonderful mentor.
I would also like to thank Louise, Tony, Catherine and Laura for advising me when I needed it.
Thank you also to Fiona Inglis and to Ali Watts and Julie Gibbs at Penguin for all their work in getting this book to its final stage.
And, finally, thank you to Anne and Andrew for their unwavering support and love.
Behind us the ocean is pale blue.
I hold the photograph up to the light and look closely. The colour has faded but I can remember it as it was. Silver-blue, but pink with the warmth of the last of the day.
We are silhouetted. Two young girls. Long limbed and gawky. Awkward, thin and misplaced. Me more so than Frances. At twelve, she stood poised on the edge of change and hating it. Furious with it and with everyone around her. But she had a certain grace, a certain strength in her defiance. You can see it, even in that picture.
At eight, I was still safely cocooned in childhood. Still on the right side of the fence. But I wanted to be like her. In the photo, I am trying to stand in the way that she stands. I am trying to look the way that she looks. But I am a child and she is not.
Our features? Eyes? Nose? Mouth? I hold the photograph closer but nothing is discernible. We are figures against a pale-blue backdrop. I cannot see the details, the parts that made up who we were. But if I close my eyes, if I concentrate, I can remember.
And it is the heat that I feel first.
Standing with my eyes closed in the house where I live with Martin, my photograph on the table in front of me.
Feeling the warmth of the sun on my shoulders as I lie in the rock pool again. Knowing that this is where I am because this is where I was every day of that summer.
And I am concentrating. I am taking myself back.
The row of shells on the rock ledge next to me, but they are not shells. They are my jewels. The seaweed on my back, but it is not seaweed. It is my hair. My legs stretched out in front of me, but they are not legs. They are my tail.
I remember.
I am a mermaid. Sliding down into the pool and holding my breath. Swimming down to my palace, deep down in the dark-blue sea.
This is the way I was.
And far off, the boys dive-bomb from the jetty. They run, full pelt, along the wooden planks and then leap, high in the air, legs tucked tight against the chest, shouting wildcat calls as they crash, like bullets, into the depths.
While outside this house, the house where I am now, the wind comes up from the gully, shaking the winter-wet branches of the trees, cold and bracing.
But I am not really here.
I am there.
In my pool, with my back to the jetty. Lost in my world; my sister, Frances, somewhere in hers. Up there on the jetty, leaning lazily against the railing, with the boys, a cigarette in one hand, her free arm draped around the waist of the toughest boy, the best-looking boy, a boy who also smokes a cigarette, pinched between his thumb and forefinger, down to the butt and then flicks it expertly into the ocean, where it floats bobbing on the surface.
This is what it was like. Day after day.
This is the place to which I try to return.
But it is not just this general picture that I am trying to remember. It is not just the summer as a whole. I am always trying to narrow it down. I am always trying to take myself back to the one day, to pick out the details that made that particular day what it was.
I turn the photograph over in my hands. On the reverse there is nothing, just the word ‘Kodak’ in pale-grey print. I have not written our names or the date on which the photo was taken. It was one of those days, but I do not know exactly which one.
No one knows I have this picture. Not even Dorothy, my mother. I have always kept it hidden and I change the hiding spot regularly. Or else I carry it around with me, tucked into the back of my diary. I bring it out when I am alone, when Martin is out and I am in the house by myself, when there is no one behind the box office desk with me, or on the bus after work.
I have had this photograph for years.
I have had it since that day.
And for months afterwards, I would keep it hidden under my pillow and each night I would take it out and stare at it, trying to take myself back, going through every detail to see if there was something I had missed, while at the other end of the house, my mother would be sitting in front of the television, chain-smoking in front of an endless blur of pictures, until, at last, she fell asleep.
I would hear her.
And then it would be quiet.
Silent.
I would turn off my light, close my eyes and tell myself, Okay, one more time, from the beginning, in order, and I would start again, picking through that day, piece by piece, from beginning to end.
And this is what I still do.
This is what I am trying to do now.
With my photograph under the light, I am taking myself back to that day.
Tell us what happened? they would ask when they questioned me later. And I would. Step by step. Over and over again.
From the beginning.
I would take myself back to that morning. I would see my mother getting ready for work, standing by the sink, a cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other, telling us what she always tells us. Frances is in charge. I must do as she says.
The sizzle of her cigarette as she butts it out in the sink. The pink lipstick on the rim of her coffee cup.
I start from here because this is where they would tell me to start. This is the logical place. Tell us what happened? they would ask. From when your mother left, they would say.
And I would hear her slam the door, late, shouting out instructions, running back to get her keys, her hair already loose and wild about her face.
And then gone.
Just Frances and I.
And then? they would ask, sometimes leaning forward, encouraging me to keep going, sometimes sitting back. Step by step. Over and over again.
And I would hear my sister telling me I have ten minutes and I know she is telling me I have to be ready by then, that she will go regardless of whether I am ready or not. It is up to me.
Step by step, through that day. Over and over again.
And I am racing to the bedroom, pushing past her. She is putting on her new bikini that she nicked from Grace Brothers last week. She is rubbing coconut oil into her legs. She is smearing gloss on her lips.
All of these details I can remember and recite.
Wait, I cry as she starts heading for the door, because I am still making my bed.
She has left hers as it is.
Wait, I shout again, knowing that she will not listen to me, knowing there is no time to smooth out the blankets and fold over the sheet in the way I like.
And I am running out the back door, into the glare of the day. I am chasing her, telling her to wait, seeing her there at the gate, pulling my towel off the line, pegs scattering behind me, as I run to catch up.
This is the way it was.
This is where I start because this is where they tell me to start.
But sometimes I want to go back. Further and further. Sometimes it doesn’t feel right. Sometimes I just don’t know. How can you understand one day without understanding the day before and the day before that one?
I have to stop myself. I have to pull myself back. Because otherwise it would be endless.
I have to begin at the beginning, from the place they tell me.
I have to remember.
Today is my twenty-eighth birthday. I am catching the bus down to Dorothy’s house. Martin will join us later and I will cook dinner for the three of us. It was his idea. Not hers and certainly not mine.
Martin and I live at one end of the number 12 bus route, Dorothy lives at the other. From the foothills to the beach. There is one road and it stretches, straight and wide, no bends, no deviations, only the occasional slight rise to alleviate the monotonous miles.
I know this road well. I have travelled it more times than I could care to imagine.
When I was young, I caught this bus from my mother’s house to school. I would sit near the front, where the adults sat, not wanting to hear the others down the back, and hoping they would not notice me. But they were impossible to ignore.
The old man sitting next to me would tut-tut and shake his head in disapproval as a school bag came spinning up the aisle.
You’re dead, mate, and there would be a scuffle and a thump as someone hit the floor.
The girls would laugh, blowing perfect streams of smoke into the air, and the bus driver would pull over to the side of the road.
Okay, he would shout, you and you – out.
Not one of them would move.
You heard me, and he would glare at them, one more time, before finally giving up with a shrug of his shoulders.
And the bus would groan as he veered it back into the morning traffic.
I caught this bus into the city when I studied Business at the Institute of Technology. Lectures five days a week for three years, and I would go in on the number 12 in the morning and home on the number 12 in the early afternoon. When I finished studying, I started working at the State Theatre, and I still caught the number 12. From Dorothy’s to my job.
Now that I live with Martin, I just catch it from the other direction, from Martin’s house to work, and, once a week, from work to Dorothy’s and from Dorothy’s back to Martin’s, travelling the entire route, from the sea to the newly planted eucalypts in our suburb.
So, I know this road well.
I know the progression of houses, from the neat brick homes where Martin and I live to the cluster of office blocks in the city, to the sprawl of low houses that get shabbier as you get closer to the beach.
I know each brick fence, each gravel drive and each front door.
I know the shops, the small supermarkets, the milk bars selling hamburgers and the video stores. A group on every third or fourth corner, and the occasional one on its own, a furniture shop or a hardware store that struggles to stay open, because no one stops along this straight wide road any more.
When we get the insurance money, we will move to a place like that, Dorothy used to say pointing to one of the new brick houses closer to the city. She would squeeze our hands. Your father loved me and he will have made sure that we are all right. She would toss her hair back and her voice would become louder and louder. He loved me and I loved him.
Everyone on the bus could hear. We could feel their eyes on us and we kept ours fixed on the ground. Staring at our feet. Waiting to see who would kick first. The tap of my sister’s toe against my heel, the knock of my own shoe against hers, back and forth, back and forth, in time to the relentless flow of our mother’s words.
When the insurance money finally did come, it was only just enough to buy the house that we lived in, the house that I grew up in, the house that I did not leave until I was twenty-two.
I have never wanted one of those new brick houses. But I live in one now. With Martin. His mother left it to him when she died.
On our third night out together, he took me back to his house and when he opened the front door, I noticed the smell. It was like everything had been covered in plastic. I stood at the entrance, hesitant to go in.
This is it, Martin said proudly as he turned on the hall light, and I remember wishing he hadn’t said that. This is it. This was the escape that I was choosing.
I sat nervously in the lounge room while he made me a cup of tea. It was like sitting in a waiting room. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a photo on his desk. I picked it up and held it under the light. It was a wedding photo.
My wife, Martin said, when he brought the tea in.
I was embarrassed at being caught, and in my rush to put it back where I found it, I dropped it.
I should have told you, he said. She left me, he explained, about four months ago, and when he looked up from the floor where the photograph lay at our feet, I accidentally brushed his hand.
It’s all right, he said, we weren’t suited.
I looked down at his wife’s face, there in her white dress on the shag pile in his mother’s house, and I could feel the pressure of his hand in mine.
Everything was quiet.
Outside, the evening wind from the gully was making the gum trees sway and bend, silver against the night sky, leaves shaking in a mass, and I closed my eyes and imagined I had slammed his front door behind me and run up those streets, up past the last line of houses to the blackness of the hills beyond. Running as I run in my dreams, tireless for miles, until from somewhere high above, I looked down on all this. All the lights of the houses, sparkling small and insignificant, and in the midst of them, this house, with him and me sitting here in this room, in this silence.
I did not lift my gaze to meet his. It was him. He lifted my head in his hands until my mouth met his, and he kissed me. Briefly.
I will show you the bathroom, he said.
And I followed him, silent, thinking, This is it. This is it.
Outside it is night. In winter, it gets dark early, and by the time I leave work, the day has gone. When I look out the bus window, I can only see the lights of the houses and the cars. I lean my head against the cold glass and feel the chill against my skin.
By the time we reach my stop, the bus is empty. It is the second-last stop on the route. Martin’s house is the second-last stop at the other end of the route. I pull the cord, and the bus driver brakes suddenly.
Sorry, he says, I thought everyone had already got off.
I can only just hear his voice above the shudder of the engine as he pulls up to the side of the road. But I think that was what he said to me.
The wind is blowing off the sea and there is salt in the air. I can taste it on the tip of my tongue. My coat flies behind me as I walk down the road to the small group of shops at the back of Dorothy’s house.
Every week I shop for her. John Mills, the doctor who lives up the street, also shops for her. He buys what she needs. I buy the things that she does not want him to know about. She leaves a list on the table for me, near the door, so that I will pick it up when I leave. Without anything ever needing to be said.
I buy her cigarettes at the newsagency and her beer at the bottle shop next door. I also buy food for our dinner tonight; steak, potatoes and peas, and, at the last minute, a cake from the supermarket because it is, after all, my birthday.
As I am coming out of the shop, I see Mrs Donovan. I try to look away, but it is too late. Our eyes meet.
Hello, Elise. She smiles and her voice has a measure of concern. They are all like this. They will always be like this. How’s your poor mother? she asks.
I tell her that she’s fine and as I speak, I turn my whole body away from her, wanting to look like I am in a hurry.
You know if ever there’s anything you need done, you just have to ask.
I am not sure what she means but I smile politely and thank her.
I’m sure Jo-anne would love to catch up. Maybe you could come and have dinner next time she visits? Or I could arrange an evening?
Jo-anne is her daughter. We went to school together but we were not friends.
Mrs Donovan is not really concerned for me. She is just curious. They are all just curious. Still. After all these years.
I tell her that I must hurry. I turn my back on her as I am saying goodbye because I do not want to see that look on her face.
On Military Road the wind is wild. It comes straight off the ocean. I can feel the spray from the sea even though I am two streets back, and above my head the pine trees creak dangerously. The streetlights are out and I walk quickly, head down, forcing my way through the gust. There are not many cars. One comes towards me, crawling slowly, and I can hear the bass of the stereo speakers long before it gets close. As it passes, the driver leans on his horn, and someone winds down the window and shouts out to me. I cannot hear the words above the music and the roar of the wind. It may be someone I know. It may not.
I just keep my head low and walk faster.
I hate these streets at night.
You often do not see things until you are forced to see them through the eyes of someone else.
That is the way it is for me.
I do not think I ever really saw our house until Martin first came here. I do not think I ever really saw Dorothy either. But perhaps I did. Somewhere, deep inside. I just did not want to admit it to myself.
This is the house that my mother came to when she married Franco. Thirty-two years ago. Eighteen and pregnant, with her wide, startled eyes and her thick auburn hair. My mother was beautiful. This is what she has told me. Often.
I had the most beautiful legs, and she would pull her dress up high, right there on the street. Frances would ignore her. I would blush scarlet. She would keep on talking. But now look at them. This is what happens when you are left on your own with two children. And she would sigh, then drop all her bags on the pavement, so that she could truly sigh, with no distractions. He loved me this much. She would stretch her arms out wide. He really loved me. She would sigh one more time and then she would pick up the shopping with one last sigh to signal that the performance was over. It was our cue to start walking again.
But a few steps further on, she would start again. Her litany was endless.
We had nothing but our love for each other, she would tell us. We did not even own this house. Your father had to go off and earn money. As soon as we were married.
And he had. Miles away. A linesman with the electricity trust in the far north.
It broke his heart, to be away. Because he loved me. This much. And her arms were outstretched again, graceful like the ballerina she had dreamed of being.
This much, Frances would mock, rolling her eyes in disgust. This bloody much.
Don’t, I would say, but she would not stop.
This much, this much, this much, as she would dance around the room, and I would watch her, terrified of Dorothy walking through the bedroom door and witnessing Frances’s mockery and my own guilty laughter. This much, and she would pull me up from where I sat on my bed and twirl me round, both of us giggling now, her skirt up high, both of us laughing, twirling and twirling, until we collapsed, dizzy, exhausted, on the bed.
This much, we would whisper, one more time, in unison. This much.
And then Frances would turn away from me.
This much, I would say, hopefully.
But she would not respond.
This much, I would try again. Wanting her back. Reaching for her. My words faint in the silence that had descended.
But the game was over. As suddenly as it had begun.
My mother is fifty now. It is not old, but she seems old. She is no longer the wild girl who danced too much, talked too much and drank too much.
All the boys were in love with me, she would say, looking at herself in the mirror. The girls did not like me, they were envious, but the boys . . .
I can see her now as she would have been then. Never still, never silent, eager, laughing too loudly as one of them put his hands on her hips and another stroked her thigh. And I can see the other girls, sipping their shandies and watching with tight-lipped disapproval, whispering behind her back and shaking their heads, She is so embarrassing.
They were envious, my mother would repeat.
Perhaps they were. But now they are just curious, thinly veiled by a sad-eyed, ‘we knew this would happen’ concern. Poor thing, they say to each other, and they look at me, worried and anxious, including me in their circle of righteousness as an act of charity.
But my mother is oblivious to them. This house is now her world. She does not see them and she does not hear them. She probably never did.
She spends most days sitting at the kitchen table, writing letters or clipping newspaper articles and arranging them into two neat piles: ‘Similar Stories’ and ‘Possibilities’. She pastes these into scrapbooks. There are a pile of them in my old bedroom. She does not look at them again, but she needs to know they are there. They may contain that clue, that link she needs should she ever come close to unravelling the whole story. Because I think she still believes that one day she will find out what happened. I think she still believes that one day she will know.
So, when I arrive at the back door, she is there at the table. She is always there. In the yellow of the fluorescent light, she reads and pastes and reads and pastes. When I leave her, she goes back to her seat and continues, while outside the winter winds numb the hands of the old men on the jetty. Fishing for sharks in the midnight ocean.
This is my mother.
I never really saw her until I was forced to see her through the eyes of someone else. She never really sees me, and she never will. She looks at me through a cloud. The few words I say are like branches scratching on the windowpanes. Irritating, but they do not touch her. They just beat on the thick glass that protects her.
When Martin first came here, I was forced to see her as she is, and to see what this house had become. But perhaps I already had, and that was why I never wanted him to visit.
Or perhaps I did not want to see him.
He came to the front, although I had told him not to. We have always come in the back way. The front door was stuck from years of wet winters and long dry summers. I pulled and he pushed but it would not move.
Come round the back, I kept on telling him. But he did not listen.
Jesus, he said when he finally burst through, the whole house shuddering with the force of his impact, you need to do something about that.
And as he stood there, hot and sweaty in the dark corridor, I saw the rips in the carpet and the dim yellowing paint on the walls, fibro walls that sagged like cardboard in the wet and dried again in the intense heat of summer, powdery dry. And I saw him in his neat jeans and ironed shirt with button-down collar, his face pink and shiny from the effort.
I’ll just get my things, I said, hoping he would stay where he was, but he didn’t. He was right behind me. Through the lounge room and past the photograph of Frances.
Who’s that? he asked.
I told him it was my sister, but as I spoke, I kept on walking, out to the kitchen, with him right on my heels.
She was there, sitting at the table, watching us both as we came in.
Dorothy.
He held out his hand, but she did not move. She just looked at him. Up and down. I did not want to see what she saw.
Pleased to meet you, and Martin pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her. I think I just about succeeded in knocking the house down.
She turned back to her papers.
She continued reading.
Anything interesting in the news? he asked.
Not yet, and she did not lift her gaze.
I could feel my fingers pressing into my arms, white, and I willed him, with all my concentration, to notice that I wanted to go.
Shall we have a cup of tea? he suggested, thinking that the two words he had managed to drag out of her were an indication that she was coming around. There’s no rush, is there? and he looked up at me, standing silent by the kitchen sink.
Dorothy put her scissors down.
I am quite busy, she said, in the pompous voice she uses when she is irritated. I have a lot to get through, and she indicated the pile of papers in front of her.
I was looking directly at Martin now, waiting for him to meet my eye, waiting for him to understand. And at last he pushed his chair back, the leg lifting a corner of the lino. He flattened it back down again.
She’s a little dotty, isn’t she? he said as we headed out the back gate, and he reached to put his arm around my shoulder.
I had already moved away.
The three of us are in the kitchen now. I am cooking my birthday dinner and Martin is talking loudly about work. I do not listen. I concentrate on pounding the steak until it is tender. Dorothy does not listen either. She turns the pages of the paper slowly.
Outside the wind howls. It blows in through the crack under the door and lifts the carpets in the hall. If I stepped out there now, it would be billowing, like the ocean, beneath my feet. Martin once offered to tack it down for her but Dorothy told him there was no need. She liked it as it was.
Your father always enjoyed a steak, she says as I drop each piece into the pan. She speaks above Martin until he is forced to be silent. When he would come back from work, tired and hungry, I would cook it for him.
It is likely that she is lying. I cannot remember Dorothy ever cooking for him. But perhaps she did, back then, when he was alive. I cannot remember.
Martin clears the table. He reaches for the pile of Dorothy’s papers but she stops him.
These are not read, she says, and she moves them herself to a stack in the corner of the kitchen.
Martin offers us all a glass of wine. Dorothy only drinks beer and I do not want one, but he pours three glasses anyway.
It is one of his favourites. An excellent year, and he sniffs his glass appreciatively.
He passes one to Dorothy but she ignores him.
I have a present for you, she says, and I am surprised she has remembered, even more surprised that she has made some effort towards celebrating the occasion.
She goes off to her bedroom and comes back with a bundle of brown paper tied together with one of my old hair ribbons.
I am anxious as I take it from her. Martin leans over my shoulder and I can sense his amused curiosity. He is wondering what Dotty Dot, as he likes to call her, has got for me.
To most eyes, it would seem to be just an old piece of material. Pale-blue and dirty. But I can feel how slippery cool it is beneath my fingers and as I lift its weightlessness from the paper, I know what it is. As a child I had loved it. A wedding gift she had bought for herself. A satin dressing-gown. I remember how beautiful she had looked as she had spun around the living room in it.
And as I smile at her, she smiles back. It is just a moment, a brief instant, but it is enough to make me glad to have come here after all.
Thank you, I say and I can see Dorothy is pleased I am pleased.
Martin leans over my shoulder. I’m looking forward to seeing you in that, he laughs.
That night, we drive home in silence. The windows have fogged in the rain and Martin swears as he leans forward to wipe a small circle of vision in the windscreen. The heater is on full and there is no air. I am concentrating on pushing down the nausea.
Well, that wasn’t so bad, he says, referring to the evening.
His voice jolts in the quiet. I do not answer him.
He turns on the radio and starts humming to the music.
Although God knows what she intended by giving you that filthy rag. He takes my hand and squeezes it in his own. There is concern in his voice now and I do not want to hear what he has started to say. I think we’re going to have to talk again, he says, gently, about the possibility of a home.
I stare out the window.
Not tonight, he says, patting my fingers, but soon.
I stare at the patterns the rain is making on the glass and I think to myself that I will not even bother to turn around and fight him. He is a fool to think that he could make her leave that house. He has no idea.
Don’t sulk, he says, when we pull into the driveway.
Why the silent treatment? he asks as I brush my teeth.
You’re impossible, he says, finally giving up on me, and he shrugs his shoulders as he turns towards the bedroom.
I want to be by myself.